Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor who has said that he would have the Israeli prime minister arrested in the Big Apple and who axed his predecessor’s pro-Jewish executive orders within hours of taking over City Hall, is considering two vocal critics of Chassidic Judaism to helm the city’s Mayor’s Office on Combating Antisemitism, per Politico reporting.
Moshe Davis, who still lists himself as director of that mayoral office on LinkedIn and X, has drawn widespread praise for his service in the role under former mayor Eric Adams.
Jack Kaplan, vice chair of Brooklyn Community Board 12, a self-described yeshiva graduate, called Davis a “rock star,” whom the “Mamdani administration would be lucky if they can retain.”
Eddie Esses, senior adviser to Sam Sutton, a Jewish New York state senator, wrote that the reported front-runners are “absolutely disgraceful” and told the mayor, “If you truly care about fighting antisemitism, you’d keep Moshe Davis. If you don’t, we’ll make sure every Jewish New Yorker knows what you did.”
“While the New York City mayor gives us lip service about ‘standing in solidarity’ on Holocaust Remembrance Day, he considers Jews who despise Judaism to help us fight antisemitism,” stated Inna Vernikov, a Republican and minority whip on the New York City Council. “You can’t make this up.” (A former Democrat, Vernikov is Jewish and very outspoken about antisemitism.)
According to Politico, the two under consideration are Elad Nehorai, a writer and former Chassid, and Phylisa Wisdom, who leads the liberal advocacy group New York Jewish Agenda.
Both have been vocal critics of Chassidic communities, which could make their relations with New York City’s large ultra-Orthodox populations difficult.
Nehorai, who has written about leaving ultra-Orthodox Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for Los Angeles, and about “disconnecting from the community that had brought me in, taught me what it meant to be an observant Jew and empowered me in so many ways,” declined to comment on Wednesday on whether he is being considered.
Benny Polatseck, a Chassid and a former multimedia producer in the mayor’s office under Adams, referred to Nehorai as someone with “a long history of incitement against the Orthodox Jewish community.”
Before running New York Jewish Agenda, Wisdom worked for Yaffed, a nonprofit founded by Chassidic Jews that calls for reform of secular education at Chassidic schools, and which many Chassidic leaders and others have referred to as anti-Chassidic.
She grew up in a Reform Jewish home and states that one of her earliest political experiences was “lobbying for reproductive rights with the Union for Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center” and that “she has nurtured that same spirit of activism and commitment to social justice throughout her career.”
JNS reached Wisdom by phone, and she declined to comment on a potential City Hall job.
The hiring is being closely watched, particularly since Mamdani has an already-tenuous relationship with much of the Jewish establishment in New York City, home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
Mamdani reportedly received 33% of the Jewish vote in 2025’s mayoral race, much of it from young voters. He is also anti-Zionist and has refused to criticize the slogan “globalize the intifada,” though he said in a July 2025 New York Times report that he personally would no longer use it.
The mayor also supports the movement to boycott Israel, and one of his first acts as mayor, on Jan. 1, was to revoke his predecessor’s executive order banning city agencies from boycotting or divesting from Israel. He also revoked the order that adopted the widely-used International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred, which includes certain forms of criticism of the Jewish state.
Rabbi Yaacov Behrman, a Chabad press liaison and founder of the Jewish Future Alliance, which does voter education and holds an annual iftar for Muslims and Jews in Crown Heights, doesn’t believe that Mamdani will hire either of the two.
“The whole point of maintaining an Office to Combat Antisemitism is to send a message of reassurance to the Jewish community,” he told JNS. “That’s why I don’t put much stock in the rumors. They simply don’t make political sense.”
“This is a role with the potential to do real good at a critical moment while also reflecting positively on the administration,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he appoints someone very supportive of Israel as a Jewish state.”
“That’s the message he’ll want to send: ‘I may disagree, but I respect the mainstream perspective within the Jewish community,’” he said.
Behrman stated that Chassidim “worked with Moshe Davis precisely because he maintained constructive relationships across all segments of the Jewish community.”
Dovid Margolin, a senior editor at Chabad.org, stated that “either Zohran Mamdani is trolling the Jews, or he’s getting terrible advice.”
“Both of these choices would make the mayor an even bigger pariah than he is already in the community,” he wrote. “Totally unforced error if he goes in this direction.”
